cahn | Classics Salon!

So yeah, anyone who has been around this DW for more than a very little while has known that we had a salon in which we discussed Frederick the Great in particular and 18th-century Enlightenment figures in general.

But nooooow we are going to have a Classics salon!

My Classics background is, er, well, I guess my Classics history is pretty much on par with or somewhat worse than my general non-US historical background (read: I know almost nothing, with some random pockets of slight layman knowledge), and my Classics literary background is signficantly worse than my general literary background (no real reason, it's not like I had a vendetta against it or anything, I think I just didn't happen to have a good entry point). I've read the Odyssey last year and the Aeneid reasonably recently, and the Iliad not so reasonably recently (perhaps this will be the impetus for me to check out the Wilson translation), and Ted Hughes' translation of selected Metamorphoses.

Please feel free to tell me what books I really ought to be looking at next! (I believe there has been some discussion of Plutarch?) Feel free to wax eloquent about your favorite translations, whether it's something I've already read or not! Also please free to tell me any of your favorite Classics history you want, because I probably don't know it :)

(This is not supposed to be just for

mildred_of_midgard and

selenak, although of course I expect them to be prime contributors. I know that many of you, probably all of you, know a lot about Classics that I don't know, so please inform me! Tell me your favorite things! :D )

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

zdenka

*perks up ears* I know things about Classics! :D I studied Latin and Ancient Greek in college.

I mentioned my favorite fiction above, but I think you should read some ancient Greek tragedies! They're very operatic and I think you would like them.

In chronological order, the surviving tragedies are by: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. They each have a different style and how they deal with myth and the gods is different.

Sophocles is my personal favorite, but they're all good. The Oedipus Cycle would be a very classic place to start? Or maybe Sophocles' Ajax, since you've just read the Odyssey and it features Iliad-Odyssey characters. I also love Euripides' The Bacchae -- it gives me chills. Euripides' The Trojan Women is a heartbreaking play about what happens to the women and children after the fall of Troy.

As for translations, I anti-rec Lattimore. I find his translations flat and unpoetic and boring. :P Some Classicists like him because he sticks close to the original Greek (at the expense of making the English sound good in my opinion), but I think that's not very helpful when you don't know ancient Greek and are relatively new to reading the Classics.

I can probably dig up some positive recs if you let me know where you want to start. :D

Oh, and maybe Suetonius if you want to read about the early Roman emperors? He's kinda the gossip tabloid of the ancient world. :D Not always reliable, but entertaining.

Speaking of not always reliable but entertaining: Herodotus! :D I'm actually quite fond of him. And every once in a while you get something like gold-digging giant ants.

Also also, if you're not familiar with Berlioz's opera Les Troyens: the music is great and it sticks close to the Aeneid.

From:

cahn

:D :D I knew you had some knowledge here, I was very much hoping you would chime in! Yay!

Ohhhhh I actually saw The Trojan Women... decades ago now... put on by a Classics department in Greek (we had translations of course), and I remember it being just stunning.

But okay, let's see, maybe let's go with the Oedipus cycle to start, do you know any good translations? And ha, I am glad you also do not like Lattimore (who I tried out and who put me off the Odyssey for a while).

Ahhhh I have seen Suetonius and Herodotus name-dropped, excellent!

I have seen Les Troyens around but I have not listened or watched it at all! Right, I will have to rectify that!

The probability I get to any of this before Yuletide is over is dim but I am really hoping to at that point! Thank you!!

From:

zdenka

I should say first that I don't keep up with the newest translations! But I have two translations of the Oedipus Cycle and I like them both in different ways.

One is the complete plays of Sophocles, translated by Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb, edited by Moses Hadas. The other is the Oedipus Cycle, translated by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald.

Haha, no, not a Lattimore fan! The Classics department at my college kept trying to push his translations on us, and I Did Not Like them!

I should mention, in case you're not aware: it was a convention of ancient Greek tragedy that characters could not die on stage. So it's very common for a dramatic death scene or other catastrophe to take place offstage, and then you get a messenger who comes onstage to tell the audience about it. :)

From:

cahn

Ooh excellent thanks!

Ha, I did not know that was a convention, thank you for mentioning that!

From:

jenett

I've been trying to get the brain to come comment, and this is as good a place as any!

So, hi, my father was one of the leading scholars on ancient Greek theatre, specifically how you stage the thing, and I grew up learning a lot by osmosis. (Because my legal last name is the same as his, it's not something I explicitly link in public, for the obvious online reasons...)

But, whenever I'm talking about Greek theatre to people, there are a couple of points I always want to point out.

1) In an ancient Greek amphitheatre (of any size, but it's true even up to the huge ones like the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens), sound quality with a speaker who can project their voice is vastly better than visual detail. (Especially if you adjust for things like 'no one in this audience has glasses or magnifying lenses of any kind.)

So the texts of the plays include things like "Hark! Here comes Oedipus, he has put his eyes out."

Partly because you don't want to do that on the stage, but also because the people more than 15 or 20 rows back are getting very little visual detail. Big broad gestures, whatever is super bright and obvious on the mask and costume, not much else.

(My father did stagings of various plays using 24" tall cloth and plaster marionettes. What you get in your average university lecture hall / stage with those is about the same level of detail you get with actors in an amphitheatre, in terms of the visuals, the sound, and the balance of info.)

2) This means that translations designed for a modern stage really have to do some editing, or they're super reptitive. The audience can see Antigone! And the expression on her face and what she's doing with her fingers and how she's standing. You don't need to tell us all of that.

3) I am very partial to my father's translations for a bunch of reasons, but he died in 1990, and he argued (and I agree) that you really need to retranslate every 10-20 years.

Not for the 'which current Hollywood actress do we compare Helen of Troy to" (ugh, please don't, it's not helpful) or more obvious slang reasons but because the rhythm of language shifts over time, how we structure things and put emphasis. There's obviously a range of that, but it means that a translation from the 50s, even if it's close to the original, is going to sound clunky to the modern ear, and especially in performance.

4) I am a huge fan of Euripides, for his ability to set up a story and about halfway through flip everything you thought you knew sideways, but it's not like we have a vast surviving number of plays, they're all interesting in their own way.

(Though I do recommend throwing a comedy in there for contrast. Lysistrata gets regular revivals, and is super bawdy, especially if you find a translation that balances that translation well. In the Greek, a lot of the bawdiness comes out of puns rather than just crudeness, though there's blatant stuff too.)

From:

cahn

Oh wow! Thanks so much for talking about this with me! :D :D This is amazing and awesome.

I guess it makes perfect sense that there's a lot of repetition and stage direction -- sort of the same idea (though a much smaller instance) as musical/opera acting having very big visual gestures in a way that sometimes doesn't quite work in the new digital age of also doing proshoots with closeups :D Oh wow, the 24" marionettes really bring home the scale of it!

Oh, I see the point of having to retranslate for modern language rhythm -- that makes so much sense! though I'd never thought about it that way before. On the other hand, I am not going to be performing these, and I have read and enjoyed enough literature from the past century that I think your father's translations could work well for me. I think I might be able to find one. I'll see. (...you are talking to the person who fell shatteringly for Dante through Dorothy Sayers' translation, though I read that a quarter-century ago, and I suppose language has had another quarter-century to evolve in that time, and I've found at least one other translation I like better in that time as well...) In any case, your comment gave me the impetus to spend some time poking around at what translations were available, so thank you for that!

Also, your description of Euripides sounds awesome -- I love this in all my media :D